


a feast of starlight

by sleepy_santiago



Category: The Hobbit - All Media Types
Genre: -slaps hood- this bad boy can fit so much projection, Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst with a Happy Ending, Asexual Thranduil, Asexuality, Boys Kissing, Coffee Shops, Coming of Age, Constellations, Falling In Love, First Kiss, Fluff and Angst, Getting Together, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Meet-Cute, Neurodiversity, Non-Sexual Intimacy, Pining, Romance, Social Anxiety, yes this is based on that one tweet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-17
Updated: 2021-03-17
Packaged: 2021-03-26 00:54:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,374
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30097809
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sleepy_santiago/pseuds/sleepy_santiago
Summary: Another fifteen minutes ticked by before the cafe’s door opened again. Elros and Tauriel chatted softly at the other end of the bar. Every note of the saxophone melody from the jazz playing over the speakers pounded against Thranduil’s skull. The customer in front of the counter cleared his throat.“Can I get a...java chip frappe with half ice and extra whipped cream?”“Does anyone feel like making a frappe?” Thranduil’s voice, though low, cut through to Tauriel and Elros.Looking up from something they were doing on Tauriel’s phone, both shook their heads.“Sorry,” said Thranduil, still inspecting the water trickling over his fingers. “No one wants to make it.”
Relationships: Bard the Bowman/Thranduil
Comments: 9
Kudos: 17





	a feast of starlight

**Author's Note:**

> this fic was originally based on me wanting to write [this tweet](https://64.media.tumblr.com/208af18e518e7f5dbf3fac1ccdbf4c5f/790cd6f9c1fa93f4-46/s1280x1920/fb0198f65531ecdd125c1884d026f905dac5e680.jpg) as a fic and turned into 6k words of projection basically (my experiences and sexuality aren't the exact same as thranduil's but they're close lol)
> 
> content warning with minor spoiler: this fic deals with coming to terms with asexuality. it's rated M because thranduil reflects back on not enjoying sex with a previous partner and exhibits some signs of what could be interpreted as unresolved trauma.

Ten minutes before he had to leave for work, Thranduil woke up. Copper leaves rustled outside the window and the smell of a neighbour’s freshly baked bread wafted into his apartment somehow and he’d never felt more like dying.

Unable to follow his usual morning routine, Thranduil threw on the itchy shirt he’d forgotten to return at the mall, rushed out the door, and immediately bumped into his neighbor, who happened to be making out with last night’s date in the hallway. A dull throb, just present enough to worsen Thranduil’s mood, had begun to flare at the base of his skull. Face heating, Thranduil fled and hopped on the bus to work, where he emerged behind the counter out of breath as he tied the green apron around his waist. 

“Morning, Dick,” said Elros. 

“What the hell?” Thranduil snapped, scratching under his collar. Why had he bought that shirt?

Elros pointed at Thranduil’s nametag — or, as Thranduil began to realize, their recently retired coworker Dick’s old nametag. He seized the nametag, ready to rip it off, but Elros stayed him with a hand on his elbow.

“No time. Line’s growing. We need you at the register.” Elros’s lips twitched.

Thranduil frowned and took up his station in front of the cash register. From her own post at the espresso machine, Tauriel inclined her head in sympathy.

The amount of gazes that drifted to Thranduil’s chest even as he spoke, and the suppressed smiles that followed, made him wonder how Dick ever survived working with this nametag on. He punched orders into the computer, listed modifications, and thanked customers for pennies clinking in the tip jar. His cheeks ached from forcing smiles. By the time the lull after lunchtime rolled around, Thranduil’s fingers had begun to shake, just enough for him to miss the same buttons every time he tried to type something into the computer. 

“Sorry,” he droned at the blond woman checking her watch. “Sausage fingers. Just a moment.”

She got her iced almond milk latte with honey and vanilla syrup and left eventually. Thranduil slouched artfully against the back counter and sipped at his iced coffee, his fingers gripping the plastic cup so hard the condensation dripped between his fingers.

Another fifteen minutes ticked by before the cafe’s door opened again. Elros and Tauriel chatted softly at the other end of the bar. Every note of the saxophone melody from the jazz playing over the speakers pounded against Thranduil’s skull. The customer in front of the counter cleared his throat. Thranduil barely repressed a wince.

“Can I get a...java chip frappe with half ice and extra whipped cream?”

Thranduil could already hear Elros’s groaning about having to sail back and forth between the hot bar and the cold bar and the frantic whir of the blender and the saxophone and the jazz and the— 

“Does anyone feel like making a frappe?” Thranduil’s voice, though low, cut through to Tauriel and Elros.

Looking up from something they were doing on Tauriel’s phone, both shook their heads. 

“Sorry,” said Thranduil, still inspecting the water trickling over his fingers. “No one wants to make it.”

There was a disbelieving huff. Give it a few seconds, Thranduil thought, and the guy would storm out with threats of bad Yelp reviews. At least Thranduil wasn’t wearing his real nametag. Poor Dick would just have to continue taking the punches weeks after he’d clocked out on his last shift.

“What, not even for royalty?” said the customer, still standing there.

With effort, Thranduil looked up. The young man in front of him slid a pair of black sunglasses off his face. He had the top half of his shoulder-length hair tied back into a messy knot and he had green eyes like the forest, stubble on his jaw, and a wry smile. His skin looked dry and there was a spot of toothpaste on his hoodie and he was beautiful.

“Do you go to Mirkwood U?” the customer said. At Thranduil’s nod, he continued, “I live in the Dale townhouses. My townhouse hosted a party last night — I don’t even remember why. I genuinely can’t think of a single reason why we’d have had a party. It wasn’t the weekend or finals week or anything. We decided to throw a rager on a normal Thursday night, like, three weeks into the semester. Anyways, Dori brought a keg in and someone stole Gandalf’s sparklers from his lab and everyone was having a great time forgetting about quizzes and readings until a skunk walked in. No, yeah, a literal skunk. Struts right in, tail up high, like it knows it has us in the palm of its little skunk hand, and we all just fall silent because it does. I think we must’ve stood frozen like that for, like, ten minutes before anyone dared to move enough muscles to whisper about what to do with Smaug as it poked its nose around the sofas and stuff — Alfrid named it Smaug after some video game dragon. Then Aflrid tripped over a pile of books trying to get away, and then the skunk started stalking toward  _ me _ . So I backed away and stepped toward the door and got it open without startling the thing and let it out and they all crowned me King of Dale.”

“Is that an honorific position? Or do you have actual duties? A political infrastructure?” Thranduil asked.

“That’s a very good question. I can tell you that I’m going to get the shower in the evenings and the good portable fan in the summer. And Alfrid’s first edition Spiderman comic. I don’t even know how much it’s worth — I just wanted to piss him off.”

Despite himself, Thranduil smiled. 

“So...if no one wants to make me a frappe, how about an iced coffee?” the customer ventured.

Thranduil bit his lip and grabbed a plastic cup, poising his Sharpie over the side. “Can I get a name?”

The young man grinned, sunshine lighting his mossy eyes. “Bard.”

~

Bard appeared around one o’clock again a week later. He stepped up to the counter and scanned the menu overhead. Long lashes fanned against his browbone. Finally, he smiled at Thranduil.

“Has it been as long a day for you as it was the last time I was here?” Bard asked. “Are you getting off work anytime soon?”

“In about fifteen minutes,” said Thranduil. Thank God. “What can I get for you, Bard?” 

Thranduil tensed for a moment, realizing his slip-up. Out of the corner of his eye, Lindir turned to watch. He cursed internally.

Bard’s smile only grew. “What do you recommend?”

Thranduil tallied up the prices in his head. “Venti flat white’s my go-to.”

Bard smirked and shook his head, but said, “Venti flat white it is. And I’ll get a tall black coffee for me.”

Nonplussed, Thranduil punched in the order and let Lindir make the two drinks. A few minutes later, Lindir called Bard’s name and set the two drinks on the counter. Bard ferried the cups to a table by the window where he fished his phone out of his denim jacket’s pocket. 

Thranduil couldn’t help noticing that Bard didn’t glance out the window at approaching pedestrians or watch the door for any sign of movement. The last fifteen minutes of Thranduil’s shift trickled by and he headed into the backroom to untie his apron and grab his things.

He half-expected somebody to be sitting in front of Bard, laughing at a joke over their coffees, when he emerged in his grey cardigan and high-waisted jeans. 

But nothing about the scene had changed. Bard stood and looked right at Thranduil. He extended the ridiculously tall cup toward Thranduil.

Thranduil blinked rapidly.

“You don’t have to accept it,” said Bard, casting his gaze downward. “I have a very caffeine-addicted sister who’d love this.”

Thranduil coughed and took the coffee. A muffled curse and the slop of liquid spilling onto the floor sounded from behind the counter. Thranduil whipped around to glare at Lindir, who stared dolefully at the puddle of milk at his feet. 

“I have to go to class,” Thranduil said to Bard, “but I do appreciate the gesture.”

“Let me walk you to class?” 

Thranduil hesitated.

“If you must,” he said with exaggerated haughtiness. He glanced at Bard to make sure the tease registered — the other man threw back his head in a laugh. Wind swept over the sidewalk as they stepped onto it, blowing Bard’s hair around his face. “I don’t know what I did to deserve a royal escort.”

“Ah, but you’ve left out an important bit of information — you are the royalty.”

Thranduil raised an eyebrow. “I wasn’t aware. Do we rule separate kingdoms? Adjacent, perhaps? Economically interdependent?”

“You’re really thinking this through.”

“I need to establish the logistics of our hypothetical monarchies, Bard.”

“You remembered my name.”

“I did.” Thranduil kept his eyes on the pavement.

Bard’s silence had a thoughtful quality to it, and Thranduil dreaded what he might ask next. 

“Is your name really Dick?”

Thranduil felt a little offended on behalf of the time he’d briefly inherited Dick’s name. “What if it is?”

Bard pursed his lips. “Nothing wrong with that.”

“It isn’t.”

Laughter tumbled out of Bard. “Okay, good.”

Thranduil shoved at him. 

“Ow, careful! Hey, in my defense, I still bought you that coffee when I thought your name was Dick.”

When they reached the stone steps of Esgaroth Hall, Bard stuffed his hands in his pockets. Thranduil had exceeded his daily limit for eye contact and gazed somewhere between Bard’s ear and shoulder, but the brunette didn’t seem to mind. Finally, Thranduil said goodbye and turned to ascend the steps.

“Hey,” Bard said, causing him to turn back around. “I hope you know you aren’t obligated or anything, but...can I have your number?”

Thranduil, busy staring at the freckle on Bard’s forehead, registered the question at a delay. “Um — yes.”

Bard’s eyes widened. “Really?”

Tapping his phone number into Bard’s phone felt a little surreal. When Thranduil handed it back, Bard smiled at him. 

“I’ll text you,” Bard said, and he walked off.

~

Thranduil received the text that night. He saved Bard’s number to his contacts before replying.

**Bard:** can i take you out this weekend? 

**Bard:** it’ll be a date fit for kings, i promise

**Thranduil:** you’re corny.

**Thranduil:** yes. where are we going?

**Bard:** hmm, i’m not telling you

**Thranduil:** i’m not a fan of surprises...i like to be prepared.

**Bard:** fine, girl scout— you can prepare yourself for a feast. :)

That Saturday, Bard leaned against the tree outside Thranduil’s apartment. 

“Will you tell me where we’re going now?” Thranduil asked, already exasperated as Bard handed him a Venti drink. He took a sip — a flat white, of course. “How do I know you’re not taking me somewhere to kill me? Are you taking me to…” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “...a  _ secondary location _ ?”

“If I wanted to kill someone, I wouldn’t kidnap them.” Bard smirked. “I used to be a competitive archer in high school. Sniper arrow’s the only way to go.”

They descended the stairs to the subway station. Underground and walled in by grey concrete without the touch of sun or moon or wind that didn’t come from long dark tunnels, time seemed to cease. There was no indication of whether it was day or night or evening or morning.

As the train on the opposite platform rushed through the station, a blur of steel and velocity, Bard turned and grinned at Thranduil. When Thranduil’s long hair settled back over his shoulders, he realized that he was smiling back at Bard. 

~

“This is the planetarium,” said Thranduil.

Bard raised his eyebrows. “Astute.”

“You said to prepare for a feast.”

Bard flung his arms up at the nebulae wheeling across the domed ceiling. Shadow and light shifted across his face. “A feast of starlight!”

Thranduil sighed, leaned back, and kicked his feet up on the back of the seat in front of him. The theatre’s concentric semicircles of seats looked morosely empty. Bard and Thranduil sat in the center of the middle row, cloaked in silence and stars and darkness.

“Aren’t you at least going to point out the constellations to me?” Thranduil asked.

Bard squinted up at the projected sky. He pointed. “That there’s the Little Dipper. Pretty, isn’t it?”

“You’re pointing at Canis Major.” Thranduil took Bard’s wrist between his fingertips and moved his arm away. He felt the warmth of Bard’s skin all the way down to his stomach. 

Bard’s eyes remained on Thranduil as the blonde gazed upward and guided Bard’s arm to the actual Little Dipper. “You know your constellations.”

“My father is an astrologer.”

“You mean an astronomer?”

“No, an astrologer.” Thranduil smiled wryly and leaned back. “Astrologer-adjacent. He was an ethnographer and he went around working for astrologers and psychics as part of his research. He used to take me camping outside of the city when I was little and he taught me how to tell the stars apart from each other.”

Bard whistled. It travelled along the curve of the ceiling.

“What about you? I never asked what you were studying.” Thranduil’s gaze returned to Bard.

“Astronomy.” Bard grinned.

“Stop playing around.”

“Psychology,” Bard capitulated. “And you?”

“Anthropology.”

“Taking after your father, I see.”

“My father was a sociolinguist,” Thranduil said. “But, yes, I suppose I followed in his social-scientific footsteps.”

“Are you close?” Bard leaned forward a hair. Thranduil’s breath stilled. His mind played him a montage of every kiss he’d shared with his ex-boyfriend, Lirion, as if trying to remind him how to do it. But Bard just blinked at him, waiting.

“I don’t know. I’ve never understood how to quantify a relationship like that. We talk about TV shows and the death of my mother and gardening and whether I have what it takes to go to grad school. He doesn’t know I’m bi. Are you close with your parents?”

“Well, now you’ve put it that way, I don’t think I could answer, either.” 

Thranduil scoffed. “My apologies.”

“I’m one of four kids,” Bard said. “The eldest. I’ve always been a bit of a third parent, you know? It never felt like we had time to be parent and child together. You know?”

“I’m an only child,” said Thranduil, watching the star Arcturus and trying to identify a pattern in its soft blinking. “So I don’t know. But I imagine it must be hard. Which is why I feel like a bit of an asshole for saying this, but I’m a little jealous.”

Bard laughed, crinkling the corners of his eyes. “You’re not an asshole. Actually, it sounds terrifyingly lonely, your household. No offense.”

Thranduil nodded. “It was. But I realized early on in my adolescence that if I had no one else, I had myself. That I was the best friend I could give myself, because no one else could love me in the way I could love myself.” He turned away, flushing. “That sounds stupid.”

“No, not at all.” Bard shook his head. He slipped even further forward. Thranduil blinked rapidly, unsure where to fix his eyes. 

Eventually, they drifted back to sitting with their backs against their seats, staring up at the stars. Thranduil pointed out another set of stars for Bard and told him the story of the cowherd and the weaver girl. Bard watched the sky, entranced, as he listened, as if he could see the winding river and the magpies flocking to form a bridge for the exiled lovers to meet. When they emerged into grey daylight half an hour later, it felt like stepping out into another dimension. Bard led him a few blocks south to a Thai restaurant, where he bought Thranduil a box of noodles to make up for the lack of an actual feast. He got himself rice and green curry. They took the train and Bard walked Thranduil back to his apartment, leaving him with a cheesy bow and a grin. 

Not once did Bard lean in for a kiss.

~

Bard gradually stopped coming to Starbucks to buy coffee and started coming to pick Thranduil up after his shifts. They walked with each other to their classes, bantering about their kingdoms and bitching about their days and, on a few occasions, arguing about Esperanto and Broca’s areas and Venti drinks. Bard found the book Thranduil’s father wrote at the campus bookstore and brought his dog-eared, annotated copy with him on their walks. Apparently, he’d mentioned the book in his Psycholinguistics seminar’s group discussion and gotten good reactions. 

Once, he brought Thranduil a CD he’d burned in his senior year of high school after his father gave him his old Walkman. Thranduil borrowed a CD player from the school library and played it as he took a bath the evening after he turned in his midterm essay for Labour and the Arts of Living. It spat out a seemingly arbitrary medley of Amy Winehouse, Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Counting Crows, and Ginuine songs. He played it over and over again until he had to return the CD player.

Bard made Thranduil feel a familiar and alarming way. It was the way Lirion had made Thranduil feel before they started dating in Thranduil’s freshman year — like perhaps there was someone he could spend all his time with, someone who would want to spend all their time with Thranduil.

Lirion had always handled him with what Thranduil interpreted as gentleness. Lirion’s thumb rubbing circles into the back of Thranduil’s hand in the back of a cab made warmth ripple through him. His arms wrapped around Thranduil in sleep made him feel like a precious thing. But Thranduil found it hard to accept that the arm pinning his leg around Lirion’s waist, or the fingers sliding inside him, or the stubble scraping his neck and the hot breaths in his ear were meant to deliver gentleness. 

Lirion had grinned at Thranduil after their first time, face flushed, golden hair strung across his face. 

“You’re so beautiful,” he’d said. “I love you.”

So Thranduil mumbled it back and Lirion dragged him forward for another kiss, wet and hot.

~

They sat on the couch in the living room of Bard’s townhouse with a bowl of chips wedged between their hips and the lights off, only the TV screen illuminating their faces. Bard’s roommates had scattered for the night — Alfrid to his D&D group, Percy to the bar with his friends, and Braga to an evening lecture. 

Thranduil turned suddenly to Bard as the Sorting Hat proclaimed Hannah Abbott a Hufflepuff. Bard stared intently at the screen. One hand scratched idly at his scruffy jaw. Thranduil traced the long sweep of his lashes. Bard popped a chip into his mouth and licked the salt off his lips.

He peered at Thranduil. “Are you okay?”

Thranduil nodded mutely. They turned back to the movie.

“ _ SLYTHERIN _ !” the Sorting Hat yelled. A jeer rose from the Slytherin table.

~

Once, when Bard had run out to pick up a pizza and Thranduil read on the townhouse couch while he waited, Braga came home with his girlfriend, a tall blond mathematics major. She stopped to chat with Thranduil about the book he was reading. She’d read it for an English class last year and hadn’t liked it.

“I think the way Batuman thinks of love and intimacy is just at odds with how I think of it,” she said.

“‘It?’” said Thranduil.

“Love and intimacy,” she clarified.

Braga called to her from upstairs. She gave Thranduil a little wave and disappeared up the stairs.

Alfrid emerged from the kitchen with a tub of ice cream and a spoon. “She’s pretty, isn’t she?”

Thranduil nodded.

“I guess Bard’s got a type.” Alfrid leered. At Thranduil’s narrowed eyes, he clarified, “Did you not know? They used to, ah, have a thing. Bard and Marybelle. Before she and Braga got together.”

“I don’t really care about who Bard’s dated.”

“Well, I don’t think they really dated,” Alfrid said.

The front door opened and a pizza box slipped through, followed by Bard. When Thranduil turned back around, Alfrid had vanished.

~

Somehow, they decided to take a trip to the coast together during reading week. Bard found a cheap AirBnB cottage tucked away on one arm of the coast and they drove up in a rental car the afternoon after Thranduil’s last meeting with his senior thesis advisor and Bard’s last shift at the psychology lab. The sun dimmed as they wound along the serpentine stretch of highway, glittering bright gold and then bronze and then diminishing into copper sparks on rippling waves as they rolled to a stop at the beach that sprawled in front of the cottage.

They sat on a log and dug their toes into the sand. Operatic streaks of indigo, periwinkle, and cardinal red arced in the sky before them. Salt stirred in the restless air. Thranduil shivered and looked at Bard and at the wind ruffling Bard’s wavy hair. He had a single grey hair by his temple.

“Can I kiss you?” Thranduil asked.

Bard turned to him, lips parted in surprise. 

“Never mind.” Thranduil started to turn away, but Bard grabbed his hand.

“No— yes.” Bard’s green eyes flicked between Thranduil’s. “Yes, please.”

They traversed the space between them one aching millimeter at a time. Thranduil’s eyes fluttered shut as his lips found Bard’s, warm and pliant. Bard’s hand came up to touch Thranduil’s cheek, so gently that his calluses tickled rather than scraped. 

Bard gasped against Thranduil’s mouth. His hand ended its tender journey at the base of Thranduil’s skull, fingers in his hair, scratching softly in a way that sent sparks through Thranduil. His other hand came to rest at Thranduil’s waist, a warm weight.

They leaned their foreheads together. Thranduil realized that his own hand gripped Bard’s wrist.

Bard smiled, a little goofily. “I really like you.”

Thranduil licked his lips. His cheeks were flushed. “Me, too. I— I really like you, too.”

~

The queen-sized bed stood by a sliding glass door overlooking the beach and ocean. Thranduil woke in the middle of the first night and folded himself into a cross-legged position on the floor in front of the door, a knit sweater draped over his shoulders. The stars shone brighter on the cloudless coast, twinkling over the water and illuminating the bedroom. Out of habit, Thranduil followed the bowl of the Big Dipper and tracked the stars Dubhe and Merak all the way to Polaris. 

“What are you looking at?” The sleepy mumble came from the bed.

Thranduil smiled over his shoulder. “A feast.”

Bard’s one open eye creased in silent laughter. “You look so beautiful.”

A lump lodged itself in Thranduil’s throat. 

The next morning dawned grey and drizzly. Bard wanted to stay in bed all day, so they hauled their laptops from their bags and studied side by side under the duvet. Bard ate a bar of chocolate in bed even though Thranduil told him not to and they had to get up and fold away the blankets to brush the crumbs off the sheets. Sometime before the sky grew dark, Bard wound his arm around Thranduil’s waist and they kissed, their knees sliding together, their toes touching.

The following day, the sun broke through the clouds and they left the shelter of the cottage to wade into the sea. They splashed water at each other and Thranduil jumped on Bard, knocking them both over. Their heads bobbed under the waves rolling over them and they resurfaced again and again and again. Bard flipped over like a toy sailboat and did a handstand on the ocean floor. 

They towelled off on the sand as a blue hush fell around them and the water grew inky. Back in the cottage, they cooked and ate an easy dinner of microwaved mashed potatoes and steak, then showered and retired to bed, where Bard let Thranduil curl into his side, his strong arm looped around Thranduil’s shoulders. 

He smelled of cheap laundry detergent and green apple shampoo and the sea.

~

On their last night at the cottage, long after dark fell, Thranduil rolled over to face Bard. 

“Do you like kissing me?” he asked.

“Yes. Do you like kissing me?” Bard asked.

Thranduil couldn’t help feeling taken aback, even though he’d posed the question first. “Yes,” he answered honestly.

“Good,” Bard said softly.

“But…” Thranduil struggled. “But...do you not want more?”

Bard frowned.

“You never touch me anywhere besides my face and my hands. You never push for more. We never progress past kissing.”

“You never said you wanted more,” said Bard.

What did he want from Thranduil? Thranduil wanted to voice the question, but Bard’s reply had frozen his tongue. 

~

Thranduil wore his hair in a braid down his back on the drive back to campus. Bard kept reaching over to flick at it, his eyes still on the road. Thranduil couldn’t help feeling like he could spend the rest of his life doing this with Bard — just the sun and the stars and the two of them together.

As they edged back into the city, driving past Starbucks — Tauriel and Lindir should be manning the counter this evening — and drawing ever nearer to Thranduil’s apartment, the weightlessness of the coast began to shed itself from Thranduil’s skin. By the time Bard pulled up at the curb and dropped Thranduil off, he felt so immovable and rooted to the ground that he wondered how would carry his suitcase upstairs. 

Facing the grey sheets of his own bed was even worse. He drifted off into dreams of golden hair and hands prying him open to expose the red, pulsing flesh inside. When he woke, sweating and shivering, the bedsheets around him were cold and empty.

The sky lightened into the colour of day-old tea. Thranduil poured a glass of red wine and sat by the window and looked out at the starless vault.

His phone buzzed.

**Bard:** i miss the sea already.

_ I miss you already _ , Thranduil wanted to reply.  _ I think I’m falling for you and I don’t know what to do about it, because I don’t know how to be in a relationship. _

**Thranduil:** me too.

~

Thranduil felt like a teenager. All day, he agonized over the question of how exactly individuals became couples. At what point was it appropriate to say to another person that you didn’t want to die without them by your side? That you thought of them in the most arbitrary places, like in the baking aisle of the grocery store, and on the curb as you prepared to cross the street, and in the middle of a lecture on bivariate regression? Stories of romance made it seem like these moments just fell out of the sky, when in reality, everything remained a blob of feelings and looks and existing until you put a shape to things by letting someone else shape you from the inside out.

He ran into Marybelle in the food hall. They took their trays to a vacated table and ate together — beef teriyaki for Thranduil, a grilled cheese and pistachio baklava for Marybelle. 

“I pulled out my copy of  _ The Idiot _ again,” Marybelle said, “after our conversation the other week.”

“Oh?”

“I just couldn’t stop thinking about it for some reason. I reread it over reading week.”

“Do you feel any differently about it?” Thranduil asked.

“I didn’t realize it until someone else pointed it out to me,” she said, “but Selin and Svetlana seem to have a more intimate relationship than Selin and Ivan do, even though they aren’t a couple.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Say what?”

“That they’re not a couple.”

Marybelle thought for a moment. “I’m not sure. I guess because they never say that they are.”

If the cowherd and the weaver girl, banished to opposite sides of the heavenly river, never spoke their relationship into the universe, did they cease to become lovers? Thranduil wondered what Bard and Marybelle said to each other if, as Alfrid claimed, they’d never dated. He could picture Marybelle’s serious face on Bard’s pillow. “I think we should be clear,” she would have said. “I don’t have feelings for you. I just want us to touch each other in a number of intimate places and elicit a variety of pleasurable sensations in each other and go our separate ways.” 

Thranduil laughed.

“What?” asked Marybelle, grilled cheese halfway to her mouth.

“Nothing,” said Thranduil.

~

Bard stood in front of the counter, talking to Tauriel, when Thranduil stepped out of the backroom at the end of his evening shift. 

“There you are.” Bard’s smile was like a drop of honey. “See you, Tauriel.” The two waved at each other and Bard held open the door for Thranduil.

“I thought you had class at this time,” said Thranduil. His words coalesced into frosty clouds before him.

“Well, yeah, but I wanted to see you.” 

“Any particular reason?”

“Normally, no, I wouldn’t need a reason,” Bard chuckled. “But yes, actually, I have one tonight.”

“Sounds serious.”

Bard stayed quiet for a few moments. Thranduil glanced at him.

“Bard?”

“Thranduil…” Bard stopped walking. Thranduil had to double back a step. “It’s just...I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you since you refused to let me order a frappe at Starbucks. And it’s terrifying, both how much I like you and how many things about you I like. I could spend the rest of my life learning new ways to be with you.”

Thranduil’s heart convulsed.

“I just need to know if — if you want the same thing as me,” Bard said.

Thranduil didn’t know. That was the whole problem. He wanted the answer to be yes, but he didn’t know. He took Bard’s hand and squeezed.

“I...I need some time to think about it,” he murmured, eyes on the ground.

Bard squeezed back. “Okay. That’s okay. Time, space — I’d give you all of it.”

And he did. 

Snow fell heavily that night, and when Thranduil woke in the morning to a white desert outside, Bard’s warm voice and rough hands and velvet eyes seemed more like a mirage he’d had than a real memory. He wandered through a world silenced by snow and then thawed in lecture halls as his professors gesticulated at the podiums. He wrote two essays and registered for next semester’s courses and confirmed with the registrar that he was graduating in the summer — an entity that felt as alien and ghostly as two lovers made of starlight with the galaxy between them. He worked shifts at Starbucks and cradled a Venti flat white in reddened hands on his bus rides home. 

In bed, he curled in on himself, piled under three layers of comforters, but the ache couldn’t be assuaged. The more Thranduil touched himself, trying to trace his veins and his bones to the source of the ache, the more he felt at a loss. It didn’t seem possible that an absence could impress this much hurt. Maybe this was why people got scared of the dark — because the light somehow kept the pain at bay. He opened his laptop and played his favourite comfort film, Ghibli’s  _ A Wizard of Earthsea _ .

Thranduil never talked to other people about things like his favourite movies, things he could write about thousands of words at a time alone in his room. Whenever he thought about trying to convey the significance of a book to a certain moment in his life, or his affection for a character, his brain overflowed and his throat clogged up and he started to panic. He went as far as to consciously avoid having to talk about things he liked, guiding conversations with a rein gentle enough to never alert the other to his manipulations. Being a fan online, he enjoyed—the distance, the lack of watchful eyes and listening ears. If he couldn’t even do something as ordinary as tell another person about a thing he loved, how could he put himself in a position for someone else to love him?

~

After the first few times, Lirion asked Thranduil why he never initiated sex. He phrased it that way exactly, like a direct quote from a relationship counsellor’s script.

Thranduil had been stunned into silence. He tried to think of an answer, but the more he floundered, the heavier Lirion’s mouth sagged.

“I’m sorry,” Thranduil tried to offer.

“It’s okay,” Lirion said in the tone of a parent whose teenager had not angered but disappointed them. 

The next week, Thranduil knocked a cup onto his kitchen floor and the argument they had over the puddle of glass shards turned into a shouting match. Lirion left, along with his hoodies, his  _ Harry Potter _ DVD, and his razor.

~

Bard had green eyes. Bard had brown hair that wavered in the wind, with one grey strand on the left side of his head. Bard had leathery calluses on his right fingertips from pulling back the bowstring. Bard had a pink mouth that smiled at Thranduil and seemed so far away now. Bard loved the ocean and preferred DC over Marvel and wanted to study music, language, and the brain. He wore a hair elastic on his wrist every day. He had a Costco membership, and two denim jackets, and Thranduil’s heart.

~

Thranduil showed up on Bard’s doorstep just after the sun went down. When the door opened, so did Thranduil’s mouth, until he saw Braga peering out at him.

“Is...is Bard home?” Thranduil asked, a little irritated. 

“Yeah, I’ll go get him,” Braga said around a mouthful of nachos, and he shut the door before Thranduil could say anything.

Thranduil began to shiver. Minutes later, Bard opened the door. Without letting him speak, Thranduil blurted, “I don’t want to do the same thing I did last time.”

Bard gave him a quizzical look.

Thranduil breathed in and breathed out. 

“What I mean is,” he said, “I want you. I want you so much, and my want is so tied up in you that I feel like I’ve forgotten what desire feels like these past few weeks without you. But I always want, want, want, and I can— I can never give.” Embarrassingly, his voice cracked.

Bard slipped outside and closed the door behind him. He reached out and looked to Thranduil for permission. Thranduil nodded and Bard took his cold hands in his.

“Do you wanna tell me what this is about?”

Thranduil sighed. Here it came. He looked into Bard’s eyes. “I don’t want to have sex. That’s...that’s not something I can give you. It’s— I don’t know how to give you that. And that might change how you feel about me, which is why I’m forcing myself to tell you now.”

“Look at me,” said Bard. 

Thranduil hadn’t even realized that his eyeline had edged away from Bard’s face as he spoke. He looked at Bard.

“You aren’t taking anything away from me by not having sex,” Bard said.

Thranduil had never understood the concept of having jelly for legs until this moment. 

“And you shouldn’t have been made to feel like it’s a deficit,” Bard went on. “Because it isn’t. Not even a little bit.” He stroked his thumbs over Thranduil’s hands. “I want  _ you _ , not any part of you that you feel like you haven’t given me. I want you the way I’ve already had you for this past autumn — by my side, under the stars, anywhere in the world.”

Thranduil’s inhale shuddered.

“Is this what had you so skittish?” Bard smiled. 

“I didn’t want to lose you,” said Thranduil, curling his fingers around Bard’s. “And I didn’t want to lose myself.”

“I don’t wait either of those, either,” Bard murmured, stepping closer and wrapping his arms around Thranduil. 

Thranduil breathed in Bard’s smell, a little quieter but a little sharper out here in the cold. He parted his lips and leaned toward Bard. When they kissed, it felt like a furnace flared to life inside him. 

“Maybe we should go inside instead of making out on the porch like a couple of weirdos now,” Bard said with a chuckle. 

Thranduil laughed and nodded. Bard twisted the doorknob and pushed, but the door didn’t budge. 

“Motherf—” Bard pounded on the door. “Braga!”

His other hand tightened around Thranduil’s, a movement that caused a mortifying wave of sentimentality to well up in Thranduil.

~

“You know,” Bard said as they sat on his bed, finally warm. “My friend used to say that sex is truth.”

“What? What does that even mean?” 

“Like, sexual desire is part of something baser in human beings but also something transcendental at the same time, I think?”

“And what do you think?” Thranduil asked. 

“I guess sex could part of something that can be construed as a higher truth. But it’s only part of it.”

Thranduil considered this. “Was that friend Marybelle?”

Bard looked startled. “How did you know?”

Thranduil threw back his head and laughed. “I just know.”

~

On their first date as boyfriends, Thranduil won Bard a plastic crown at the arcade.

On their third month as boyfriends, they both accepted offers of admission from their respective graduate departments at the University of Valinor. 

On their second year as boyfriends, they flew to Iceland with two ninety-dollar plane tickets on an aircraft that jolted through the sky like it had been electrified. They drove onto a deserted road on a moonless, cloudless night with flat white snow sprawling all the way to the horizon and huddled together as they watched the northern lights.

On their fourth year as boyfriends, they landed back in their college town, where Bard delivered a guest lecture at Mirkwood University. During Bard’s day off, Thranduil convinced him to visit the planetarium for old times’ sake. When they settled into their seats in the eternally empty theatre, the sky was dark. Then, one by one, the stars blinked awake overhead. They had been rearranged to spell out a question.

On their fifth year as boyfriends, they became husbands.

**Author's Note:**

> ~~lowkey gave up in the end there, sorry~~
> 
> thank you so so much for reading <3 find me on tumblr @[sleepy-santiago](http://sleepy-santiago.tumblr.com)!
> 
> kudos and comments are always treasured <3


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